And yet another item on the iPad? Are we serious? Yes, we are, since this one is about something that even geeks who aren't interested in the iPad itself should find intriguing. Steve Jobs said yesterday that the iPad is powered by an Apple A4 processor, but contrary to what many seem to think - it wasn't designed in-house at all.

I don't mean to get too nit-picky here, but assuming the A4 has a Cortex A9 MP as its processor, it isn't the same as Tegra or Snapdragon.

Tegra has an ARM11 CPU, and Snapdragon has a Cortex A8.

Besides the core count (2 for A9 MP, 1 for the others), the fundamental microarchitectures are significantly different from one another. ARM11 and A8 are both in-order pipelines, while A9 is out-of-order.

The performance difference, even of a single-core A9 at the same frequency as the others, is consequently quite substantial.

That said, you can quite closely compare the reported A4 specs with Nvidia's Tegra *2* design. That does sport an A9 MP, but with a GPU of Nvidia's own design (of course). But overall these two are quite similar.